When we want to increase our sales, we search for new methods.
However, that search is often quite unnecessary. What's needed instead is a tiny bit of common sense. With little or no effort, you can change the way the client perceives you and your company.
Re-oxygenation isn't that hard.
Let's find out how in this episode.
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Note: (This is an unedited transcript)
Imagine going to the beach to take a picture of the ocean.
What is the colour of the water? If you have the same camera and you were at the same beach 3.7 billion years ago, the colour of the water would be a shade of purple. The shade of purple is likely to have been caused by self-urek bacteria that ruled the world at that point in time.
And changes always happened, however, that point in time, life began to change quite dramatically. Just as the continents were beginning to form, in a guanism called stromatolite started to take over.
Now, if you go to shock bay in Australia, you can see these ugly little things, but what they did was dramatic. In the sense that they started to harness their energy from the sun using photosynthesis.
The oceans were not only purple, but the air was toxic.
It was loaded with nitrogen and carbon dioxide, water vapor, and 1% of oxygen. So these guys, the instrumentalites, they would take in the carbon dioxide and they converted to oxygen. And then the stromatolites continue to expand and prosper. They put out tons of oxygen into the atmosphere.
Currently oxygen makes up about 21% of the earth's atmosphere by volume. And it's this vast amount of oxygen that allows the growth of life and earth. Even so, this oxygenation process it's tediously slow. It took eons for any substantial change to occur.
And when it comes to a business and especially sales, we need to oxygenate. Not at this slow pace. We can't wait forever. So how do we breed oxygen into our sales process?
Well, there are three ways, as you would expect. And they are Getting enthusiastic about a tiny portion instead of everything, The three questions formula, which you probably heard of before, and finally listening for objections.
Let's start out with the first one, which is getting enthusiastic about a tiny portion instead of everything.
If you've ever watched David Attenborough on many documentaries, what he tends to do is walk through a forest or the walkthrough notion, he'll go through this vast expanse of everything.
And then he doesn't explain everything. He drops to his knees when he could drop to his knees and he'd pick up a tiny little flower and then he shows you their flower and then he starts to explain about that flower. And suddenly one little flower in one obscure forest somewhere is now interesting to you.
And this method, which is getting enthusiastic about our tiny portion is what you have to do as well, is what I have to do as well, is what every restaurant has to do as well.
Because you know this, when you go into a restaurant and you pick up the menu, you have this vast choice or rather these choices to make and you ask the waiter what do you recommend. And then they give you this in an answer, they say everything.
And you knew that, didn't you?
You know that the restaurant theoretically at least is there to serve you everything that is good and wonderful and tasty. But you wanted to know about one thing, one tiny little thing. But no, they want to tell you everything. And that's not what David Attenborough would do.
So let's say you're a reseller, say you have software and the software can do this and that and everything. Well, when you go in front of someone and you're explaining that software, you start to explain everything and when you explain everything, not a lot gets through because you can be enthusiastic about everything on the menu, which is why the waiter says everything.
They can't be enthusiastic about everything. And yet if they got interested in one little thing, they would get enthusiastic about it. And you've heard me say this before, sales is a transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another. This also solves the problem of having many sales people selling your products.
Let's say that you have a company and you didn't have salespeople.
Well, they all have different motivations. One is motivated by money, the others motivated by family, they have different motivations. Yet when they're going out to sell something, what we give them is the toolkit, and we say, “Go and sell this product.”
And obviously, they enjoy selling the product, but they don't enjoy selling everything, and the key factor is always. What is a one thing that excites you the most about this product? And that salesperson will tell you what excites them the most about that product.
And that's the thing that will bring out the most enthusiasm, the reasons why the client should buy, and that's how you oxygenate that sales process. You put all that oxygen at one go and it goes from 1% to 21%, just like that, because now they're just focused on that one little thing with their excited about.
And it's the same thing when you are on a sales page, for instance, you want to talk about everything, as you should. But I can't take everything and you can't explain everything. So it's always that one little thing that you're the most excited about. That's the point that you have to get across.
And that transfers enthusiasm, that becomes that David Attenborough moment. And with that we finish the first point of how to put all of that oxygen into your sales process.
The second point that we're going to cover is the three questions formula.
What is a formula that is so effective that it gets the other person, the person that you're selling to, totally engaged, and once you hear more from you.
When I was writing the brain audit, which is the book that you get on psychotactics, well, when I was writing it almost 22 years ago, I ran into a salesperson that was selling monitored burglar alarms. And we'd already bought a burglar alarm and put it up somewhere. I was not in the market for burglars.
But instead of trying to sell me the burglars, he started to ask me questions. He says, “What happens when the alarm goes off?” And of course I answered. And then he asked me, “What happens next? Do the neighbors come to help?” And of course, neighbors don't necessarily come to help. Especially if you live in the city, and if you live in the country no one can hear it anyway. And then he asked me more questions.
But what he was doing was not trying to sell anything.
He had gotten one point across, but then he started asking questions, one question, second question, the third question, and to ask these questions, and usually the questions are related to just one point, You have to listen and when you're listening you can't speak at the same time.
Because this is what a lot of people do. Every time you tell them a story they start to talk about their story and they're not listening to you, they're thinking of their own story. And when you ask questions and I do this quite a lot with almost anybody I meet, they will say something and I will ask them one question, then I will ask them the second one, then ever last them the third one.
And if you meet me in person, you probably see that this is what is quite obvious once you know it, but what it does is it stops you from talking. And when the other person is talking, they are getting more interested in whatever they are saying, and subconsciously getting more interested in you.
We always have people that seem to want to talk and talk and talk and talk and when you're in sales or trying to sell something, you're kind of slightly desperate to sell whatever it is you're selling whether it's a workshop or some software or whatever it is that you're selling, you want to get that point across.
And when you start asking questions, the whole mood changes, the whole tempo changes, you start listening and try today, just stop talking so much and start asking questions.
Because they will say something and you ask them a question and then they will talk for a while and you ask a second question and I'm related to that same thing and then ask a third question and see how it goes. And you will find that people are more interested in you because you're more interested in them, funny that.
But in doing so, they also tell you exactly how they are thinking, the problems that they are facing, and it's at this point that they will come up with objections as well. In this podcast, we've gone through two parts. The first is just talk about one thing, one thing that you really excited about.
And everybody doesn't have to talk about the same thing.
If you've got ten salespeople, ten salespeople can talk about ten separate things individually. The second thing that we talked about was asking the three questions, because that shows you interest in the other person in not just blah, blah, blah, blah, hearing your own voice all the time.
The third thing is you actually paying attention to the fact that they are objecting.
So let's go into the third part. At some point in time, you will find that the client is objecting. Now, they're not throwing you out of the room, they're objecting. When you're selling something on a sales page, you can't wait for that objection. You have to pre-embowl the objection and you have to put it on the sales page.
And then write the answers to that, whatever the objections are. However, in a real-time situation, you want to wait for the objections. And that tells you that the other person is not throwing you out of the room that they are listening to you. And yet they have already a system of place, they have some other competitor there.
They are telling you that they actually like your stuff in some sort of weird way and under different conditions, maybe they would have bought your stuff. But they're objecting. When people object what they're really saying is, I would like to do this, but there is this other thing in the way.
In a strange way they're telling you that you're number two, that someone else, number one is already in place.
And if they goof up, when they goof up, which they will goof up at that point in time, you have free rain, you have free entry into the place, if you keep in touch. So they're very clearly specifying through their objections that you have to overcome those objections.
And if you do so, then there will be a point in time when they will say yes. It might not be now. It might be a slow oxygenation process, but it will happen. And I found this when I go out to do my photography.
Now, with marketing, we charge quite a lot of money when someone comes to a consulting session or to a workshop or to whatever. But with photography, I take all these really stunning black and white pictures and I don't charge anything. And I don't get in the way. I'm like a fly in the wall for one to verbitov.
Even so, there are objections.
Even so, there are people that go, oh, but what if this happens? what if that happens. But notice they're not saying no don't show up to take any photographs. Because if they wanted to say no, they would have said no instead they bring up the objections. And then it's kind of a waiting game.
You calm down those objections and then you keep showing up on a regular basis. And sometimes it takes a long time, a few months, a year even. But eventually, you get you foot in the door and then they love it and then they say come back anytime.
So sales is really this transfer of enthusiasm and you show enthusiasm in three ways, which is what we're doing right now, we're summarizing what we've covered today.
The first way is not to talk about everything but just to talk about that one little thing that you're excited about. Yes, it's possible that they're not excited about it, but when David Attenborough goes to reach for a flower, you don't know anything about it.
You're not objecting, “Hey, you're in show me the rest of the forest.” No, you get excited because the other person is excited. And so, start out with that, which is find something in the software, find something in the program that you have, find something that already excites you and talk about.
When I teach in design, I'm interested in the library.
That's such a cool tool. Why not know anything about the library? But I will talk about it and I will be excited about it. And that's what gets your attention rather than Indesign, which has all these tools and buttons and all of that stuff. You're not interested in that.
You just want to know, why is this library so cool? What is he talking about? But at some point in time, the client will say something and that's when you stop talking. And that's when you start asking questions. One, two, three, count your questions. Please count them. One, two, three.
And you will notice that there's a change in the atmosphere of the room. They are now paying attention to you because you're listening to them and not trying to sell them something. And finally, they will come up with an objection because a customer is not ready to buy when you're ready to sell. That would be so lovely, but it doesn't happen.
Most of the times they have objections and you just have to buy your time and make sure that you're in number two position and following up on a regular basis. But the fact that there are objections means that they're interested otherwise they're just thrown out of the room.
So pay attention to the objections and don't treat them like they're a problem but in fact there, the invitation for a party that's down the line, somewhere down the line a week from now, three weeks from now, three months from now, whenever. And yes, that brings us the end of this podcast.
What's the one thing that you can do today?
The one thing that all of us can do today is ask three questions in almost every conversation. Whether you're speaking to your niece, whose five years old, or to a grandparents who's 75 years old or to your client or to anybody. We talk so much and we don't ask questions. So one, two, three. Ask three questions.
If you try and do that in your normal day-to-day banter with people, you will find that you're more likable. And that gives you a lot of leeway in life when people like you. And it's just by asking questions.
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